From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 16:09:25 +0800
To: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>
Subject: Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
Message-ID: <199609040412.VAA13877@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 03:02 PM 9/3/96 -0700, Stanton McCandlish wrote:
>> But we do not want legislation, so we do not want to help write legislation.
>> 
>> We want to delay legislation for as long as possible, for the longer the
>> delay, the more the balance of power favors the net and disavors the pols.
>> 
>> Therefore the correct strategy is simply to attack any politician who shows
>> any interest in legislating on our issues.
>> 
>> We have no friends on Capitol hill, and if we did have friends, it would
>> still be necessary to denounce them as enemies.
>
>I agree with the general sentiment behind this, but I think it may go a 
>bit overboard. For example, it is worthwhile to support Pro-CODE and SAFE 
>(the two crypto bills now floating around in Congress). On the surface 
>they both appear to threaten the viability of the Bernstein, Karn and 
>Junger cases, but in reality neither of these bills have a chance in hell 
>of passage.  

Be careful, Leahy's bill sucked. I don't classify it as "pro-crypto" at all, 
although if you believed those organizations that initially supported it you'd 
come to that conclusion.  So somebody following your analysis (blindly) 
might have inadvertently embraced a clunker, concluding that supporting 
SOMETHING was important for the reasons you listed.  

And while this may appear to be paranoia, I suspected that that the whole 
reason for the Leahy bill was to get the "criminalization of the use of 
encryption" section on the books, the one truly awful part of the bill.  The 
funny thing is, it almost worked!  Didn't it, EFF?!?


 Burns' bill seems to be at least moderately acceptable, in that it appears 
to remove most restrictions on crypto export.  Further, I don't necessarily 
share your pessimism that these bills won't pass.  Not this year, of course, 
but possibly next year. 


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com